And this putative power could only be manipulated through a man, one of those so-called “Lords of Creation.”

It cannot have been a surprise to such an observant child as Jane Austen that this kind of limited sway was all she was going to be allowed in her life, particularly when she would probably have been aware of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, and widely discussed everywhere, perhaps even in the Steventon vicarage, where it must have offered warning rather than encouragement. Her girlhood writing both supports this harsh truth about women’s lives and chafes against it, and her mature work, too, can be read as a demonstration of submissive women and the wiles they use to get their way—their pointed courtesies, quiet words of reproof, or directed glances. At the same time, the novels show men and women to be equal in intellect and moral apprehension. This is a great paradox, and one that Jane Austen appears to have swallowed, but cannot have failed to notice.

The reality of her situation as she approached the age of twenty must have been shocking. She had no profession, and none would be offered to her. Governessing, school teaching—there was little else for women in her position, and she scorned both. She was without money of her own, except for £20 allowance a year from her father, and this dispensed in quarterly lumps. It has been suggested by the contemporary scholar Edward Copeland that we calculate a Jane Austen pound as being equivalent to $100 US dollars today, which allows Jane an annual budget of $2,000 out of the family budget of £600, or $60,000, a comfortable family income, but not at all luxurious—not when a circular mahogany dining table with strap hinges, for example, cost £5.7.6., or almost $600, and a backgammon table was priced at £1.10.0., which would be more than $100 today.

Jane Austen’s visits away from home were arranged by others, and at their convenience rather than hers. She was, in fact, dependent on the good will of family and friends for all the requirements of life and must at times have imagined and projected herself forward into the pitiable state of a spinster, spooked even at this young age by the tiresome, embarrassing neediness of Miss Bates (Emma) or the determinedly cheerful Mrs. Smith (Persuasion) and their sadly disadvantaged sisters who populated novels, women trapped between social levels and prohibited by their precariously balanced intelligence from participation in active life. For them there were only the available tricks of charm and the plotted dramas of entrapment, the glance over the tea table that redirected action or else, with great kindness and cunning, drew men away from their paralyzed silence.

Meanwhile, at Steventon, she had her books, her pianoforte, and her needlework, an activity she seems to have taken seriously. And she had her writing, which from the ages of fifteen to seventeen engaged her fully. And she had her friends. Now that the family at home was dwindling, a small sitting room was set up for her sister and herself, and here they could entertain a circle of neighboring young women. With its chocolate carpet, its bookshelves and the pianoforte, the room must have seemed cramped but congenial. The work boxes of the two sisters were displayed, and probably Cassandra’s watercolors, too, and Jane’s writing desk, the emblems of their particular expression. New neighbors, the Lloyds, arrived in the district in 1789, and Jane became fast friends with Martha Lloyd, who, though she was ten years older, possessed a similarly animated spirit. The Bigg-Wither family, with three daughters, settled in a nearby manor house. The society of these new companions was diverting and congenial. Girlish talk held sway: clothes, books, dance steps, neighborhood gossip; giddy expeditions were planned: long walks or trips into Basingstoke. (These female relationships were important to Jane Austen, whose novels ring with the music of high spirits and feminine laughter.) By the age of seventeen she was attending local balls and becoming a practiced flirt. The writer Mary Russell Mitford described her unkindly as “the prettiest, silliest, most affected husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembered.” But where was all this leading?

The dramatic story of Jane Austen’s French relations, Aunt Philadelphia and her daughter Eliza, had always been present as a parallel strand in her life, as complex and filled with mystery and color as the most potent novel. Enough years had passed to melt the early part of the account into near legend. Philadelphia Austen, the sister of George Austen, had traveled alone to India in 1752, seeing that her only chance for a life was to find a rich husband. The ensuing marriage to the much older Tysoe Saul Hancock was not a happy one, and Philadelphia’s only daughter, Eliza, was probably fathered by the more dashing Warren Hastings, governor-general of India. Eliza, a lifelong friend of Jane Austen, grew up to marry Jean Capot, Comte de Feuillide, an ambitious French entrepreneur who was guillotined in the bloody years following the French Revolution. A widow and the mother of a son, Eliza later married Henry Austen, Jane’s much adored brother, and became Jane’s sister-in-law.

This particular family narrative—Philadelphia the bold adventurer and her daughter Eliza—must have dazzled young Jane Austen with its romance and its international dimensions, and it is impossible to contemplate Austen’s life without taking so large a connection into account. From early childhood she knew she possessed an aunt who had risked everything at the age of twenty-two to go out to India, into unknown territory, where she re-created herself and her possibilities. Eliza’s history is equally dramatic—uncertain parentage, a marriage into French nobility, danger, tragedy, and finally a triumph of courage and a dash to safety within the embrace of the Austen family.

There was much visiting and letter writing between the two families after the return from India, and there can be no doubt that Jane Austen’s imagination was stirred by the story of her aunt and cousin. We see a flicker of this kind of glamorized history and worldly intrigue in a girlhood work, Love and Friendship (dedicated to Eliza), in which one of the characters, Laura, gives a breezy account of her life:

My father was a native of Ireland and an inhabitant of Wales; My Mother was the natural Daughter of a Scotch Peer by an Italian Opera-girl—I was born in Spain and received my Education at a Convent in France.

There is such a strong yearning for the exotic in this passage, such subversion of class and order! Jane Austen, bent over her needlework in the quiet of an English country rectory, was alive to the drama of her own extended family history and to her own unmet longings.